Portal To A Prehistoric Land: Long Bedtime Story

So just take a moment to allow your eyes to close and allow yourself to begin to relax.

And as you begin to relax,

I'm just going to tell this sleep story in the background.

And I don't know whether you'll drift deeper to the sound of my voice or whether it'll be to the spaces between my words.

And as you continue to comfortably drift asleep,

I'm just going to tell a story about you finding yourself walking through a dense forest and you can hear the sound of birds in the forest.

You can be surprised at how loud this forest is.

You can hear the sounds of monkeys running and swinging and jumping through the trees and the occasional rustling sounds coming from the forest floor.

And you continue to push on through this dense forest,

Having to hack your way through,

Hacking through vines,

Scrambling over roots of trees and really pushing through this dense forest,

Being aware of how short a distance you're traveling over the time that it's taking you.

And every now and then you have to stop and take a brief break and to truly take the most comfortable break,

You need to find somewhere to sit down or lie down comfortably.

And so in your backpack,

You have a canvas tent that ties between a few trees off the ground and it's over two layers and the top layer you can tie between those trees,

Giving yourself a sheltered platform that you can climb up onto,

That you can rest on and you can even put some nets around that tent so that the slight breeze that occasionally happens can pass through the tent but it keeps any insects out and gives you an opportunity to just catch your breath,

Relax and maybe even take a brief nap.

And it's really easy to be able to take that tent down and roll it up because it's just material and place it back in the backpack and then continue your journey.

It only takes a short time each time you stop to set up that tent and you can't tell clearly what time of day it is.

There's so little sunlight manages to get down through that dense canopy above that all you can tell is that it's either daytime or it's nighttime.

You can't really tell anything with any more subtlety than that and after hours of pushing through this dense forest,

You start to hear the sounds around you change.

You hear sounds of some animals settling down for the night and different sounds of other animals starting up.

There's certain insects starting up that you hadn't heard before and other sounds around you and so you set up your tent again,

This time to spend the night off of the ground resting in your tent and you have yourself something to eat in your tent and you hang a light in the center of your tent as it gets darker and darker so quickly and under the comfortable glow of that light you lie down on your belly,

Elbows propping up your head and shoulders with that light shining just over your shoulder and onto a book and you read that book and allow yourself to be drawn into that book and after reading for a little while you turn the light off and you begin to settle down to sleep for the night and at first you're still surprised at how loud the forest is,

How much noise is here even at nighttime and surprisingly to you,

You find that you start to almost get used to the sound almost as if it fades away and you know that the sound is still there but your brain treats it almost as if it's fading away as if you're not really noticing it or attending to it anymore and this allows you as those distractions now just float past almost like floating on a river as the water floats past,

You comfortably and relaxed drift and float asleep and you drift and float into the most peaceful,

Most pleasant sleep where you sleep all night long,

Awaking in the morning feeling so deeply refreshed and revitalized,

So full of energy and ready to carry on with the day and you have yourself something to eat again,

You sort yourself out for the morning,

Pack away your tent and you continue your journey through this forest,

Continuing to hack and slash your way through the forest until eventually you notice that the trees are becoming easier to push through,

They're spreading out a little more and you have this sense that you're probably approaching a clearing somewhere up ahead and you can't yet see the clearing but you have the sense that you're approaching a clearing by the way the foliage is reducing in density and then after some further hacking and slashing through this forest,

You eventually come out in a small clearing and what you discover is a large pyramid overrun with vines with some trees poking out of that pyramid,

Their roots deeply entrenched in the sides of the pyramid,

Having found the slightest cracks in the pyramid and over the centuries began to reclaim this area,

Not letting even a large pyramid like this stand in the way of reclaiming the forest and you can barely see the stonework underneath all that foliage wrapped around and piercing into that pyramid and you find your way around the pyramid and the other side has an entrance and the entrance is partially collapsed and caved in and you poke a torch in and you peer in as best as you can and you can see that the tunnel the other side of the cave in appears to be perfectly fine so you place your backpack down and you start cutting away at the vines,

Cutting away at roots that are over the stones and through the stones that are blocking the entrance and then you start removing those stones one by one,

Carefully lifting each stone from the top,

Moving it away,

Placing it on the ground and all of this is heavy hard work but with that hard work you remove the stones and so you continue to move those stones out from the pyramid one by one,

Placing them on the ground until you've cleared enough space to be able to comfortably make it into the entrance of the pyramid and you pick up your backpack,

You climb over those last few stones,

Slide yourself down into the entrance of the pyramid,

Turn on your torch to illuminate this tunnel and the first thing you notice is that it seems just a comfortable amount cooler inside this pyramid than it was outside,

Outside the pyramid was stiflingly hot whereas here the temperature is more comfortable and there seems to be a slight breeze not just because of the entrance being uncovered but because of the shape of the pyramid that the air is flowing in through that entrance and the hot air is rising up the inside of the pyramid and there's a slight hole in the roof of the pyramid that that air is escaping from and cool air is entering and flowing down to the lower part of the pyramid and the cool air isn't cold but it just makes this pyramid more comfortable on the inside and you illuminate this corridor and you can see what looks like a stone door off to one side at the back of this corridor so you head to that stone door you can see what looks like symbols all over that door you run your fingertips over those symbols feeling the texture of the way they've been carved into the stone and seeing how well preserved they still look and then you see what looks like a stone switch on the floor and you push down on that stone switch with your foot and a grinding sliding sound occurs as that stone slab slides back and then slides sideways out of the way and the whole pyramid seems to vibrate slightly as that stone slides some dust falls and fills the air and then the door stops sliding and the pyramid goes silent and you stand there for a few moments allowing the dust to settle again and you can see with your torch light the dust particles in the air and over the space of a few minutes you can see how they're beginning to calm and settle and you walk into this chamber and you see some steps you follow those steps down deeper into the pyramid you can hear each footstep echoing as you descend those steps and those steps lead down to a tunnel that seems very tall but comparatively narrow that the tunnel is as wide as the steps and the steps were wide enough but it looks even more narrow than it is because of how tall this tunnel is and you try to shine the torch up to the top but you can't really make out the ceiling in this tunnel and you can see that this tunnel seems to be very long and you can barely hear any other sounds now everything seems so still so quiet and you follow this tunnel and at the end of the tunnel there's another door only this door seems to be made of metal and you're unsure what metal it's made of but it's got a fresh bronze kind of color to it and you carefully push that door open and find yourself in a highly reflective room noticing the way your torch light just bounces around the walls as if this entire room is full of mirrors and as you turn around you can see the way the torch light bounces change directions and every now and then while you're turning around waving the torch around checking out this room you hear a slight click and you realize that somehow there's a combination of bouncing this light around the room that makes it reflect to just the right place that it seems to trigger something as you try to very carefully and slowly move the torch light around the room watching the way it bounces off the different mirrors until you hear that slight click and when you hear that click this time you hold your torch in place and while holding the torch in place you start to hear a rumble and as you hear that rumble so this chamber begins to fill with light and you see that the walls of this chamber the stone seems to be lowering down into the ground and everything other than the doorway in the tunnel you followed to get in here has lowered down and the mirrored plates seem to be like glass that you can now see through and as you look through so you find the most incredible sight you turn the torch off now that it's like daylight shining into this area and you go over to those windows and through those windows you see the most incredible and unusual land you can see the tallest unusual grass that you've never seen before and down in a valley you can see a herd of giant dinosaurs with long necks and you're surprised that they're not gray as you had imagined that they would be they're more a mottled brown color and yet as you would expect they were moving slowly slowly they were moving their necks slowly and they were feeding in a very unusual pattern they weren't reaching up to eat things high up they were moving to a location and then they would move their necks as far as it seemed to go to the left and they would start eating just over body height off to the left and then they would eat slightly further along almost like gnawing off rows of corn when eating corn on the cob they would work their way along until their head is facing as far as it can move to the right right and then they would take another step forward and they would do the same again they would eat the way along from one side along to the other before taking another step forward and just very slowly and methodically they're eating large areas of the vegetation around them and you'd imagined that they would have been eating perhaps more like giraffe reaching up and eating out of tall trees but instead they're eating in this unusual fashion and as you look around what else you can see out of this chamber you notice a herd of triceratops and again they're not the gray color that you'd imagined they were kind of a few shades of orange with a slight mottled texture and you wondered whether that helped perhaps to camouflage them in certain wavelengths that perhaps predators could see so they would blend in with their surroundings because against the green that you could see they looked like they really stood out with those orangey shades on them and you watched as they seemed to just be eating the grass and low-lying vegetation and you wanted to find a way out of this chamber so you felt your way around the walls seeing if there was any switches or anything that could help you to get out of this chamber and then you found that right in the middle of the chamber seemed to be a hole with what looked almost like a manhole cover and you carefully lifted that and saw a ladder and you climbed down that ladder finding yourself in a tunnel you walked along that narrow tunnel and it wasn't a very long walk before you came to a wall and another ladder you ascended that ladder remove what's a bit like a manhole cover over the top of this ladder and you find yourself now outside of that chamber out here in this land with all of these dinosaurs and way off somewhere in the distance you hear this rumbling throaty roar and you can't quite pinpoint where that roar comes from but you're sure that if that roar gets any closer it'll definitely be something to avoid and you look at what this chamber looks like from the outside and you can see that you can see through all of those glass walls you can see in the ground the slabs that slid down and you can see that they're all incredibly thick stone slabs and you can imagine that they're probably incredibly good at protecting that chamber from whatever is out here and you're aware as you look around that if there is anything dangerous out here this has been designed specifically so that only someone as small as a person could fit down that manhole cover close it behind them could fit through that tunnel climb the ladder at the other end and be safely inside that chamber and you don't know if the glass is able to withstand whatever's out here but the stone definitely looks like it could and you're curious how you can make that stone rise up again if you need to so you know that shortly you work at making sure you know how that can happen before you explore and you can see the way the tunnel that led down to this chamber seems to go back a little way from the chamber then it disappears into a haze as if somewhere halfway down that tunnel reality shifted and you don't know if it's a shift in reality from a dimension to a dimension or maybe a time shift back into the past but the tunnel definitely seems to end halfway and you can't walk in to the bit of tunnel that is there the haze seems to block off that bit of tunnel and it seems impossible to push through that haze you pick up a branch that's lying on the ground and you try and poke it towards the haze into what should be the inside of the tunnel but find that it's like poking a stick at a solid wall and you head back into that chamber and with it nice and illuminated from the outside you look around and you try and work out what it was that you triggered with your light and as you look around you realize that there seems to be some kind of sensor at an odd angle that can't be seen directly that can only be reached by reflecting the light from the window up at that sensor so it can detect the light coming from the window but you wouldn't be able to hit it with a beam of light just shining that light at the roof or at the ceiling of this chamber and you wonder whether because it happens to be a sensor that seems to be light sensitive do the walls naturally just rise up when it gets dark because they should only lower down when light strikes that sensor and you take a look thinking there's got to be a way of covering that sensor during the day if you needed to close up those walls and you can't see any easy way of doing that and so you just hope that there's no reason to do that and you head back out through that tunnel and go and explore you walk over to those triceratops and you walk as slowly and carefully as you can and as you walk closer you see one of them stop chewing and seem to be looking in your direction as if it's trying to work out whether you're a threat or not and so you stop moving for a moment and then after a moment it continues chewing and so you walk a bit closer and so you're very close to it and you can reach out and gently touch the neck of that triceratops you can feel the warmth given off by that dinosaur you can feel its heart beating you can feel its body moving with each in breath and each out breath you can feel the movement as it swallows some food and you can be surprised at how smooth it feels compared to how you perhaps thought it would feel and you then carefully walk away from the triceratops and you head into some slightly thicker foliage and as you walk through this foliage you see the most unusual sight it appears to be giant caterpillars on these really large flat leaves and the caterpillar is eating its way around from the outside of the leaf and carefully working its way in towards the center of the leaf with the different caterpillars seeming to do the same with some of them closer to the center than others and they seem to all eat with the same pattern and then you notice that there's a couple of chrysalis seeming to hang from the underside underside of some of these really large leaves they seem to be almost woven into the underside of the leaf to hold them in place and you're curious whether these are also the caterpillars and what they'll become curious whether they'll become butterflies or moths or something entirely different and as you're watching one of these chrysalis you notice a bit of movement you notice it beginning to break open and as it breaks open you can see that what is breaking through seems to have fluffy feathers that look so incredibly soft and they're slightly damp as they're breaking out of this chrysalis and you watch for what ends up turning into hours as they very very slowly are pushing out and pushing out of that chrysalis and then almost with a thud an animal drops to the ground from the chrysalis you kind of imagine that maybe it would be like a butterfly that would hang on as it pulls the last of itself out before puffing up its wings ready for its first flight but instead it's a creature that seems to flop to the ground and you try to have a good look at what that creature is trying to make it out and you realize that it seems to be like a really fluffy chicken-like creature except its legs look a little bit more dinosaur-like and its head looks a little bit more lizard-like and it doesn't seem to have wings for flying instead it seems to just have this incredibly fine fluffy feathers covering its whole body and you see it trying to stand up and it falls over and tips over it tries to stand up again and it falls forward and tips over again then it falls onto one knee then the other but after a while it eventually manages to stand up and stay upright and it makes a very slight very friendly sounding squeak as it tilts its head slightly and looks over at you and tentatively begins to walk towards you and when it gets to you it seems to rest its head gently on your leg making a slight friendly squeak sound and you stand up and you walk back from it a little way and it comes over to you and follows you and rests its head back on your leg again and tucks itself in against your leg and then tucks just behind your legs poking its head around your legs and looking up at you and you try and walk away again and it does the same again it comes over to you and seems to tuck itself around you and rest itself against you and so you reach down trying to work out what this little thing wants and as you reach down it comes over to you it jumps up onto your legs almost as if to sit in your arms and it seems so friendly and you're sure that you see it smiling even though it's got a face of a lizard you see the way its eyes seem to blink with two eyelids and you stroke its neck and its back and you can almost feel a slight purr coming from it where it seems to be vibrating its throat and it rests its head against your chest as it allows itself to be stroked and looked after and it seems to have created a bond with you but you know that you can't obviously take this with you you don't even know how it ends up whether it turns into an enormous dinosaur or whether it doesn't get any larger than this you don't know if it started out as a caterpillar or something else all you know is it seemed to fall out of a chrysalis on the underside of a leaf but for now you keep it with you and you carry it while you carry on exploring and as you explore and the sun continues to rise in the sky and you can feel the warmth of that sun on your face you still occasionally hear that distant low rumbling roar and you're just comfortable with the fact that that's way off somewhere in the distance and then you notice some dinosaurs that almost look like giant ostrich with lizard-like heads and you think they look a lot like this little one that you've got in your hand and you place it down on the ground and you can see that they seem to be moving in giant herds and among those really large giant ostrich-like dinosaurs are some really small ones that suddenly follow along almost seeming to be shepherded by a couple of the older larger ones to keep them all together and you notice the way that it seems that those large ones are at the front the sides at the back and they try and herd the small ones to an area near the back but surrounded by the larger ones and that there seems to be very specific ostrich-like dinosaurs who take on that role of keeping an eye on herding the young ones and so it looks like a young one among those young ones is probably going to be in the right place so you try and encourage this young one to go over to the others and at first it keeps looking back at you not wanting to go and so you try and get closer and closer thinking if it can realize that these are like it it'll hopefully join in and eventually it starts to hear the squeaking sound of the others and the deeper sound of the adults and something about the sound resonates with this little young dinosaur and almost automatically it then falls into line and runs into its place into the safety of the herd of the other young ones and you watch them for a while and you see occasionally that young one still looks over in your direction but knows that this is where it belongs and they head down through the valley and you watch until they're almost out of sight before you continue to explore and you decide that those large dinosaurs look so large that it'd be too dangerous to get too close to them that although they probably wouldn't hurt you on purpose they're so big that you'd be just something insignificant next to them that their legs are like giant tree trunks and their heads and tails stretch for many meters in front and behind them and that they sway their heads side to side and their tails swing side to side almost like a counterbalance and so it'd be very easy to accidentally get knocked by the head or the tail but you are curious what's over among the trees here but at the same time you know that's where the deepest roar has been coming from and so you don't necessarily want to go and explore those trees but then you can hear that roar getting closer and closer you can hear this thudding sound sound of giant footsteps and the breaking cracking sound of wood of those trees and you start backing up towards the chamber you head down the tunnel pop up into the chamber and then out of the wood line with head as high as the trees you see a large t-rex like dinosaur obviously a large hunting carnivorous dinosaur stomping out of those trees sniffing around moving its head left and right seemingly trying to find a scent and stomping forward some more moving its head left and right again and then following a scent it continues and it starts getting closer and closer to this chamber and you can see it just the other side of the glass you can see its breath on the glass but it doesn't seem to be able to see or detect you and something about the experience just makes you remain very quiet and just observing and then you see it walk around that chamber and it gets around to the side of the chamber where the tunnel into the chamber is you see it scratching on that stone and you notice that the front end of one of its claws catches in the stone and breaks and the dinosaur doesn't seem fazed it then just turns away from that stone and continues walking down the valley you can feel the vibrations of each step as it walks away and feel the way the vibrations reduce the further it gets from the chamber and you notice it heading down towards some of the other dinosaurs and you watch as they seem to stand their ground and appear intimidating as a herd and for now it seems to think it's not worth the risk to take any of them on and you watch as it disappears down into the valley out of sight and you head back out of the chamber and you notice the sun is beginning to set you can see the moon appearing in the sky you get that claw out of the stone you head back into the chamber again and as the sun sets just before it's fully set when the sky is still the most beautiful red you hear the sound of sliding stone and you notice that the walls are rising back up again and those walls rise back into position and as you shine your light around the inside of this chamber you can now just see your own reflection again where the walls now just look like mirrors again and you wonder what's going on outside the chamber at night what makes whoever created this feel that this kind of protection was needed at night time and not necessarily during the day and while you wait in that chamber you wonder whether to go outside and explore but before you finished wandering you hear this massive thud and whack and the chamber starts vibrating and shaking and it almost feels like you're inside a piñata with someone trying to get to the candy and you don't know what's going on outside the chamber but whatever it is it seems like it's something very large and probably not very safe and you've got more than it was that you came here for you came just to explore the history of an ancient civilization that apparently once lived in this forest that had cleared a large area of forest to create a large and successful civilization that suddenly disappeared with no explanation and there were rumors and myths about why they disappeared and you now wonder whether whatever it is that's out there might have been behind the disappearance of this civilization you don't know how whatever's out there would have got through from out there to in the chamber and then out to the real world out to your world but it would fit the descriptions of the myths about the wrath of a god bringing a giant beast down on the civilization and you find your way back out that chamber closing the door behind you following that corridor finding your way back into the main part of the pyramid you leave that pyramid and you set up camp to spend the night before heading back through that forest and while you're in your camp resting up in a tree you examine that claw you wonder whether it's something that you could sell that most people would have fossils and you wonder whether people might not believe you about this being a genuine claw because it should be fossilized but you know you can just say that you found it somewhere perhaps make it a bit dirty and then plead ignorant and let someone else try to think of a different reason about how it managed to survive all this time you're sure that it'll lead to stories in journals about dna being extracted and other discoveries being made you might end up being paid well just for this one find and it isn't something you came here looking for and as you rest there you hear the distance sound of a storm and every now and then you wonder whether that rumble of thunder off in the distance could be the sound of whatever that animal is maybe one survived until today and you know that's just your mind playing tricks on you making you wonder something because you'd heard it and experienced it as if it could be real now with no real evidence that that could be the case but after a short period of time the distant rumbling of thunder begins to help you to drift and float comfortably asleep and while you drift and float asleep you imagine the sight of the fleeting sprites dancing above the clouds and the other phenomena you have this sense of imagining a ball of lightning falling from the clouds curious whether it's just somehow some twisted magnetic field mixed with electricity that it's following slowly and gently towards the earth you're curious about what goes on in a storm and it just helps you to drift and float comfortably asleep and then you notice the sound of rain on the canopy overhead with some of that rain dripping on the top of the tent and all this just helped you drift even deeper and more comfortably asleep you're aware that this amount of rain is going to help to clear the air and make everything smell so fresh the next day and the next day you awake and you hack your way through out of this forest and it takes you the whole day to hack through and get out of the forest and after leaving the forest you board a boat which takes you down a river all the way to the shoreline and at the shore you change into a bigger boat you spend a few days traveling on that boat enjoying the sea view some days watching as dolphins come alongside the boat and play around the boat other days seeing whales breaching splashing in the sea and just enjoying your journey all the way home and once home you head to a special antique shop where you know that the owner buys unusual items and you show off that claw and they want to know whether it's genuine and where it came from they don't at first believe that it's genuine because it looks too fresh to be millions and millions of years old but as you talk to them about this claw the strangest customer walks in they've got a long flowing purple coat that seems to shimmer and sparkle as they move that spreads out when they turn and folds in when they stand still and they turn and they look at you and they start to breathe the same as you and something about their gaze fixates your gaze and then you notice your eyes blinking and your eyes shutting when you open your eyes you find that you no longer have that claw and the worker in this antique shop carries on the conversation as if nothing at all has happened and you ask who that person was who just came in here and they say that no one's been in here you've just been holding a conversation with each other and you find that in your hand is an envelope and you open the envelope you take out the letter in the envelope you unfold that letter and it just says you haven't seen anything you don't know anything and it seems to be headed by an organization you've never heard of before and the worker in this shop asks you what it was you came in here for that you haven't said yet and you say you can't remember and you try and think what it was you came into this shop for and you check your pockets to try and remind yourself and you can't even remember that you came in here with that claw you seem to have forgotten the claw and then you realize that you can't even remember what you've been up to the last few days as you try and think back over why you came to this shop and where you were before coming to the shop you're sure you must have been at home but you don't remember anything else and you apologize to the antique dealer you leave the shop and the whole journey home you're wondering what it is that you did where you've been and you arrive at home and you see your backpack you wonder why your backpack is all set up whether you've planned on going somewhere or whether you've been somewhere and then you see in a pocket in the backpack that there's a ticket for a boat trip but you don't recall that boat trip and you're trying to work out what's gone on where you've been then as you search in your backpack you end up finding what looks like a little patch of fluffy feathers and suddenly in your mind's eye you get a flash of that little friendly dinosaur and a bit like a fleeting dream you try really hard to focus your attention on that little dinosaur trying to figure out what it means where you've seen that dinosaur and as you hold that in your fingertips noticing it being so soft you start to get more of a flash of the experience and gradually start to form more of a memory but you can't quite figure it out and as you sit there a storm begins outside and as the thunder rolls in you start to imagine the walls vibrating and shaking and then you remember that you're in a chamber and you start to recall more and more of the experience and after a short while it's almost as if someone has turned a light on in your mind you suddenly remember everything and you remember someone approaching you in a shop and you remember them convincing you just to hand over that claw and you remember how distinctive they looked despite the fact that at the time you ended up with no memory of them and you would think you'd remember someone who's very distinctive and you look back at that letter and you now know that you were given that letter by whoever and whatever organization it was who got hold of that claw and that they must know where that place is and what that place is where you sought that claw and you don't know how they became aware of you or how they became aware of that place but somehow they've known about you and worked out that you found that place and now they know what you found there there and you don't know what role you'll play in the rest of that story whether you'll have to go and try and protect that place because you're aware that whoever this is probably doesn't have good intentions and so you settle down that night starting to work on a plan for how you can get back to that place and make sure that they're not going to do anything that could cause harm or danger to others or put that place at risk if they find out about the dinosaurs and that they'll probably find out very quickly that there are living dinosaurs there because of you bringing back that claw so you feel a sense of responsibility to protect the dinosaur you made friends with as well as the other dinosaurs you saw and you don't want them to accidentally or on purpose release whatever it was that may have wiped out that old civilization that may be the thing that you heard pounding on the walls of that chamber and as you think and wonder what it is you'll do in the future you drift and float so peacefully and comfortably asleep knowing you'll awaken in the morning motivated with a sense of purpose the go-getting mindset of wanting to find a solution to deal with this problem as you drift and float comfortably and deeply asleep